New York, NY (Top40 Charts) This February, Animalia
Music is excited to release Elena Shelton's debut album, a shimmering intimate journey through cycles of love and change. From the California coastline to the New Mexican mountains, this album has been written over a decade, as Elena has processed evolving relationships to those she loves.
A love letter at the core, this album explores all facets of love and friendship and is filled with admiration for humanity. At its essence it speaks of how we can learn to accept and find the beauty in the unexpected outcomes of life and how the unplanned path can be paved with something better than we thought possible.
Elena Shelton's music draws influence from Irish folk, psychedelic indie and experimental powerhouses like
Kate Bush and Bjork. Working in collaboration with Nate Salman (Waterstrider) her album was recorded in the most intimate, immediate way, playing guitar and piano live together, often recording in the middle of the night. Because of this, the album captures something rare: moments of charged synchronicity, the resonance of the time in which it was recorded, the feeling of static in the air, light creeping through the windows in the morning, the sound of birds and the ocean outside.
With the addition of violin, cello, percussion and synthesizers, the album moves from stripped back acoustic voice and guitar to epic orchestral swells which reach anthemic heights.
The two singles from the album 'Wild Night' and 'Better' take us to the poles of the record. 'Wild Night' is a hypnotic ballad reflecting on the intensity of shared loss. Better is an exuberant anthem of hope, ending the album with a chorus of outpouring joy.
Elena Shelton enters the music world with an astoundingly tender, vulnerable and real voice.
Elena Shelton was born on the coast of California in a wildly creative community of artists. Her family are painters, architects, writers and designers and she was brought up in a realm of continuous creation. Although she has been writing music since she was a teenager, before turning her full attention to it, she worked for years as a birth doula, bringing hundreds of babies into the world, supporting families through the most important rite of passage of their lives. This experience and the intimacy she has shared for years with friends and strangers, feeds into her music, giving it that distinctive quality, that is hers alone.
When Elena sings love songs, these are not the ordinary kind, for they are drawn from all she has learned being a support to new life, being trusted with the most vulnerable and euphoric moments. Elena continues to bring babies into the world, she continues to live in wild places and to write music.
